Born in Cincinnati, Ohio (b. 1981)

Nathlie Provosty

Photopia, 2018

Oil on linen
© Nathlie Provosty; courtesy the artist and Nathalie Karg Gallery, New York. Photo by Ian Reeves.

Since 2011, Katz has been making paintings of roosters that she refers to as “cock paintings,” relishing the discomfort of the term. As she has acknowledged, these works reference the male ego: “The paintings are about masculinity, and about trying to work out the iconography of power, and the attraction to it.” The Other Side depicts a rooster in motion through a series of overlapping silhouettes, speed- ing from left to right in a way that recalls Eadweard Muybridge’s nineteenth-century photographic studies of moving forms. In each of the “cock paintings,” Katz sprinkles grains of rice onto the canvas and paints over them, creating an impasto texture that reinforces the works’ materiality in the face of painterly illusion. The title and imagery of The Other Side draw on the timeless antihumor of the road-crossing chicken.

Nathlie Provosty. Photo by Melania Dalle Grave/DSL Studio

“The interactions of the quadrants was a visual/ intuitive process… Once I decided where they would go, the movement became decided by color/space needs (what goes forward or back, warm or cool, range and harmonies).”

—Nathlie Provosty